 |
| The bison watching me from the pasture as I paint. More than once over the past year I've looked up from my work to see that the bison have been watching me. If I'm working within the pasture fence, they will very slowly move closer and closer to me as I work. One time last fall, while working on the fence at night, I happened to look up and saw that the bison had moved to within 10 feet of me. The flash of the headlamp sent them all running away, but, a minute later, they were back and I decided to play it safe and call it a night. Bison can sometimes be scared away, but it's not guaranteed. |
Things have been pretty uneventful here on the ranch lately. Most of my time has been split between equipment upkeep and pasture expansion. By "equipment" I am mostly referring to the machinery I use on the ranch, such as the tractor or livestock trailer. I usually divide the field of equipment upkeep into two categories: maintenance and repairs. Maintenance is the normal routine things your supposed to do to keep the equipment running safely, such as changing engine oil and lubricating a drive-shaft. Once learned, maintenance is pretty easy as long as you keep up with it. If you don't keep up with the maintenance and something breaks then you have to do repairs. Unlike maintenance, repairs tend to be much more frustrating. For instance, literally minutes after we returned to the ranch with the
bison we brought from Texas, the front drive-shaft on our truck broke and is going to need to be completely replaced. The break was due to a lack of lubrication at the shaft's double cardan joint, which could have been avoided through routine maintenance.
 |
| The New Holland 451 sickle bar mower purchased in the summer of 2015. Though it still worked, it hadn't seen maintenance in many years. |
One of the largest maintenance projects I am currently pursuing is the restoration of my New Holland 451 sickle bar mower we
purchased last summer. The entire mower has been disassembled and each piece is being restored or replaced. Now that I'm over halfway done with the restoration, I can say that I'm very glad I decided to undertake this process. In several instances there were critical components on the verge of failure. I'll be sure to add a post when the mower restoration is complete.
 |
| The latest group of restored mower components with a new coat of paint. |
The other major activity has been pasture expansion. With the purchase of our new bulls it's only a matter of time before we have more bison, and more bison means we'll need more grass. Currently, our property is about 30 acres of pasture and 70 acres of brush and trees. Much of the wooded acreage was planted with a monoculture thousands of pines for the lumber industry. It is these pines I am now endeavoring to remove. I intend to explain this process in greater detail in a future blog post, but, basically, out of all the methods I've researched and tried, the best method is cutting each tree down with a chainsaw. What a pain.
